A/N: Just taking a quick break from writing a giant multi-chaptered fic that will probably take me about twenty years to finish. Couldn't get this out of my head. Inspired by the line, "But it always leaves me wondering whether, in another life, we'd be together" from the Lucie Silvas song Forget Me Not. Obviously, I don't own a thing.
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He'd sworn that so many things were impossible. She almost lost count of the things he pronounced as inconceivable, unattainable, and the amount of times he'd been wrong almost make her laugh, now.
Travel between parallel worlds. Living forever. Watching her wither and die while he failed to grow old. Saving the planet. Saving her. All impossible with a capital I, and probably a capital everything else for that matter. Never going to happen. "You can't".
That he might come back for her…
She tries not to think about that one. If he ever proves impossible wrong in this particular case…well, she doubts the words to express how she'd feel exist in any vocabulary, let alone her own. Is there any word, any string of words, for such bittersweet happiness, such love only made stronger by infinite, almost intrinsic pain? She doesn't think so.
And if he didn't come back? If she was left waiting on Bad Wolf Bay for five and a half hours every year for no more substantial reason than misplaced hopes and sentimentalities?
At least she won't have dreamed her life away, she reasons, waiting, waiting…
This is precisely why she won't think about it, why she won't let herself visit that beach anymore, despite the first few agonising days spent crying into and beating the sand in the very spot he had once stood. "You can't," he'd said, and she does her level best to believe him. It is the only thing that keeps her sane. At least this way she can say she tries to have a good life, like he had once asked her to in a request that now seems several lifetimes away. Not a full life, perhaps, nor as a whole person – she can be neither without him, without the life he provided for her – but a good one. Not wasted, not pining. A life lived.
Still, she had by no means reached this conclusion quickly, even when her mother managed to persuade her to leave the beach for a proper meal, a proper sleep. She had not always felt this way or thought that trying to get on with her life was the best course of action. For a long time, she had braved the biting winds and further shatterings of her heart every anniversary of her arrival on this alien Earth – every week, every month, often every day – to wait for him amongst the rocks and sand. Why he should appear on some sort of anniversary rather than any other day, she didn't know, but it seemed like the sort of thing he'd do. Impressive. Sort of.
It was only after she woke up one morning, about to be swept wretchedly away by a wave and with salt-water that the sea was not responsible for plastering sand to her cheeks, that she realised she had passed more than two years of her life in this way. That was longer than she had spent with him, and certainly much longer than five and a half hours. Enough, now. It was time she stopped waiting and got on with that good life she had promised to live. Enough.
Doesn't mean she forgets him, though. She never could. Appointments are always with "the Doctor", not "a doctor", perhaps through force of habit or some residual wishful thinking (which, she admits, despite her lack of attendance in Norway, never really will leave her). Alien encounters are always just that little bit like something they had dealt with together, even though it means drawing comparisons between the favourite food of the Sycorax and the onion-shaped aliens her boss had nicknamed "Tweebs".
But the impossible ideal of his one day returning to her? No. She can't live waiting for that, on the off-chance that one day he might feel like destroying a couple of universes and popping by.
That there might be other hims wandering around the universe…Bumping into one of them isn't something she holds out much hope for, either, if she's completely honest. He could be in a different incarnation, wearing a face she's never seen and a companion she's never imagined on his arm. Why should he love this Rose? Why should she love him? She has no reason to believe that, should she find another Doctor, things would ever be the same – especially when so much of their love sprang from circumstance.
That maybe, just maybe, one of these other Doctors might have his own Rose, his own admissions to make…Yes. She is quite happy to put her faith in that. No one can ever prove her wrong with this one, and occasionally wondering about them does her no harm. A little fantasy is good for the soul, he once told her. And so she lives her life reasonably content in the thought that somewhere, somewhere, while she watches her little brother grow up and persuades Torchwood officials to not use weapons on aliens that are already retreating, a Doctor and his Rose – maybe even her first Doctor, maybe even her nineteen-year-old self – are living out the lives they themselves had always dreamed of but never quite had the courage to realise.
Yes. Somewhere, he can tell her that he loves her without being cut off. Somewhere, she doesn't have to refrain herself from kissing some warmth into those icy eyes or running her hairs through that mass of unruly hair. Somewhere, they have forever.